“... his secret: he was a biological woman – now honoured liturgically as St Marina.Marinos, who may have lived in the fifth century in what is now Lebanon, is one of more than thirty transgender monks commemorated in Byzantine and Western texts. Many are revered as saints. Despite an explicit biblical prohibition on cross-dressing, reinforced by canon ...”

“... 973.) Biruni’s reticence about his origins has led modern scholars to speculate that he may have been orphaned or abandoned, or even (depending on the interpretation of a contemporary poem) that he was the illegitimate son of royalty. He was taken up at a young age by the Iraq family, who governed Khwarazm on behalf of the Samanids of Bukhara and ...”

“... of Mr Terry’s ‘Fireplace with Waterfall’.Jewell’s assumption that Oppenheim was a man may explain his unruffled response to Object, whose provocations slid beneath his notice: the pelt of the upturned cup, which both invites and repels touch; the spoon, phallic or digital; the saucer, a speckled disc of hair pressed down by the weight of the ...”

“... celebration of books. Jackson, an almost comically prolific author (I count 46 titles, but there may be more), has a seemingly total range and charges across many of the topics Cummings explores: libraries, collecting, catalogues, books as charms and amulets, books as bodies, prison reading, burying books, book eating, fires and destruction. Jackson is ...”

“... I grew up about 45 minutes from Athlone. Broderick must have visited the village where I lived; he may even have sat in the church where I was once an altar girl.In the opening chapter of The Pilgrimage, Michael and his wife, Julia, sit in their living room with Father Victor, the local priest, and Michael’s nephew Jim, a doctor. The group is organising a ...”

“... and ‘Is not’, ‘So’ and ‘Not so’ are smoothed away. Such Taoist doctrines may have proved productive in other fields of science – in atomic physics, for example, where irreconcilable notions about the nature of matter have apparently been resolved by the discovery of quantum field theory – but they are not what is most obviously ...”

“... loves dictionaries; he has himself edited, and contributed to, encyclopedic undertakings. He may therefore be interested to learn that he can be described as a personified dictionary entry – a simultaneous, crystal-clear definition of both meanings, and of each separate meaning, of the adjective ‘noble’. No member of the nobility mentioned in this ...”

“... sensible food. Will Nicky try to seduce either of them? Will things get messy? Now read on ... We may feel we have met this clever-naif teenage narrator before, in the novels of J. D. Salinger, Denton Welch and Colin MacInnes. But the device is still successful; and Nicky is, in a surprising way, a prize ...”

“... But Hammett was constantly quarrelling with his father at this time, and such associations may have been a youthful response to a piece of family history: in 1896, Richard Hammett had ineptly switched from the Democrats to the Republicans in a vain attempt to contest a State election. Moreover, if Hammett was seriously connected with radicalism, it ...”

“... supplied (for the time) the unquestioned background. Car-nap’s ontological frameworks, which we may find it expedient to employ but of which it makes no sense to inquire whether or not they correspond to reality, have a comparable status. Finally Wittgenstein, in On Certainty, spoke of propositions which ‘have the form of empirical propositions’ but ...”

“... a scarcity value, it is possible that early man drew it into his protective fold. Domestication may even represent the acceptance of a long-standing association between man and animal which was of mutual benefit. Undoubtedly, without domestication – ‘the greatest conservation movement of all time’, as David Harris has happily put it – sheep might ...”

“... yet another Oxford anthology of British literature. Or, doing the work in Tucson, Arizona, he may have wanted to dissent from the pious demarcations of literature in which he was officially involved: The analogue between 1900-05 and the Eighties, which have all too readily developed their own style, is obvious: we still tend to enjoy the Englishness of ...”

“... Some, like ‘Aesthetics of Comedy Asleep’, are mere squibs: ‘Don’t wake the clown/Or he may knock you down.’ Others like the witty ‘Aesthetics of Surrealism’ – ‘To find the impossible/With breasts’ – are near-Wildean aphorisms which simply flash by. But however substantial they are, all of the pieces, like tasty canapés, can be ...”

“... with the nature of language per se (regardless of what individual theorists of language may originally have intended), but, again, with concepts – with organising sets of ideas at work in history which are distinguishable by their leading terms. Discourses direct the attention of historians to what ‘history’ (reuniting both senses of the ...”

“... water, when he spots me: a clerk, my long-absent next-door neighbour. He says, as he sits, ‘Tom, may I join you?’ I say, ‘If you must.’ He says, ‘You probably noticed that I separated from my wife.’ I say, ‘I never noticed.’ He says, ‘The bone in her throat was, I rolled over in bed and hit her.’ I say, ‘I’m sorry.’ He says, ‘It was ...”